H'Dera

(As told to and written down by Virginia Hinson)Dear Victoria, As your father and I await your soon arrival, I have been thinking about my early life and how very different yours will be on another continent and many miles away from the jungles of Vietnam where I spent my early years.

I was born on April 27, 1983, in a tree-sheltered lean-to deep in the jungles of Vietnam. My parents named me H’Dera Siu, as it is the custom of the Montagnard people for the babies to take the surname of their mothers. The H prefix designates that I was a female. My mother, who was a member of the Jarai tribal group living in and around Pleiku in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, had been a nursing student in Ban Me Thuot in the 1970s. When Vietnam fell to the communists in 1975, a friend of my mom told her about a group of Montagnards that had fled into the jungle to escape reprisals from the Viet Cong. Together with two friends, my mom left Ban Me Thuot and joined the group in the jungle. While still living in the jungle some years later, my mother met my father, Y No Eban, who was a member of the Rhade tribal group and part of a Resistance group called the United Front for the Liberation of Oppressed Races (FULRO). They married in 1982, and I was born the next year. Life in the jungle was not easy for our people. Because the Viet Cong were actively searching for any pockets of resistance, my parents, with me in a sling on my mother’s back, and their friends were constantly on the alert, sometimes moving every night to avoid capture. The last person in line had the job of cutting a leafy branch and erasing all the footprints so that trackers could not tell in which direction we were heading. Our shelters were carefully disguised huts made from large jungle leaves and branches. The men slept in hammocks, but the women and children bedded down on tree limbs cushioned with extra leaves on the foliage-matted ground. Unfortunately these shelters did not provide much protection from the fierce tropical storms that sometimes swept the area or unwanted jungle visitors. One night when I was asleep next to my mother, a poisonous snake invaded our shelter and positioned itself to strike my head. Instead, it struck my mother’s index finger. Of course we had no access to medical help of any kind so my father had to cut off her finger to save her life! To lessen our chances of detection, none of the families built their shelters very close to another. Our food was anything we could glean from the jungle: wild cassava, bamboo shoots, mangoes, wild grapes, deer, frogs, snakes, ants, or pythons. Though our people advise against giving python meat to a young child, one time in desperation because we had nothing else to eat, my mom gave me some. I must have been allergic to python, though, because I swelled up badly and became very sick. Mushrooms were pretty plentiful, and so was ening, a jungle root that is poisonous unless it is prepared very carefully after been soaked repeatedly in water. Some of the roots were very deep in the ground, and we would have to dig a hole three to six feet deep to find them. The rivers, especially the Mekong River, were full of fish. In fact, the fish were so plentiful that we could catch them with our bare hands. Salt was scarce, though, so we seasoned our fish with a certain type of yellow ant which we called sour ants. These ants nested in the coffee trees, and we would catch them in nets. We then would boil the ants with the fish for a sour, lemony flavor. We would dry any extra ants for future use. Ant eggs, either raw or cooked, were also part of our jungle diet. We loved wild honey when we could find someone brave enough to climb the high trees to raid the hives. My favorite food of all was a certain type of green leaf that was covered with a white, sweet residue at various times of the year. I loved to lick the leaves before the sun got too hot and melted off the sweet substance. To us kids it was like manna from heaven! Our water supply came from puddles, ponds, or nearby streams. We had to be very cautious with our cooking fires because the Communists had stationed lookouts on the ridges to spot any wisp of smoke coming from the jungle below. I can remember my mother carefully dousing even the tiniest flame to keep the merest a hint of smoke from giving away our location. This was my life in the jungle until I was six years old, eating whatever my family could find and wearing clothes that some of the Resistance fighters would bring to us when they sneaked into the villages at night. I had friends among the children in the other families, and we made little toys from the mud around us. Our mothers constantly warned us not to scream or cry because the Communists, the “Yuan,” might hear us. We knew that our lives were in danger at all times, and that we had to play quietly. One day, though, the Communists found my friend and her family. The VC attacked and killed all of them, including my friend and her dog. Little did we know that our time in the jungle was running out, too.I still have nightmares from the day my mother, my sister, and I were captured. It happened in February 1990, between 7 and 8 in the morning when I was six years old. I remember that I was playing outside on a hill while my pregnant mother and my 2½- year-old sister were in our shelter under a tree. My father had left to go hunting for food for us. I looked up from the top of the hill and saw a group of men wearing green helmets coming towards our clearing. I ran down the hill and told my mom. As the VietCong got closer, they started firing guns at us, thinking that the campsite must contain a large group. I panicked and started running frantically around the clearing. I could hear bullets whizzing past me to the left and right and striking the trees, but miraculously none touched me. When the VC entered our campsite, they were surprised to find only three people: my mom, my toddler sister, and me. Knowing that resistance to armed VC was useless, my mother surrendered. In the meantime, my father had heard the shooting from where he was about a half mile away and rushed back to camp. As he got closer, he started firing at the VC, but his gun jammed. Thinking that the VC would massacre all of us if he continued to fight, he decided to hide out in the jungle. My mother was intensely interrogated about his whereabouts, but she refused to give any information. Hoping to trick my father into coming back to the camp, the VC held us there in the jungle for two nights. Then we were taken to Col. KaHung’s camp for more interrogation. Here we met Y Pol Eban, a Montagnard soldier who had joined the Viet Cong army. Yes, some of the Montagnards had joined the Communists for purely financial reasons and survival for their families.The next day we were taken across the river, and we were forced to walk for a week to get to the central headquarters at a place called Bien Phong for further interrogation. Y-Pol carried me on his shoulders while my mother carried my little sister. Y-Pol told my mom, “You must say that you can walk or otherwise they will shoot you.” When we got to Bien Phong, there was a big celebration over our capture, though some of the VC thought capturing a pregnant woman and two small children was ridiculous. My mother overheard a soldier say, “If I had gone, I would have killed them. Why bring back women and children?” As a reward for his part in our capture, Y-Pol was given a bar of soap, which later he secretly gave to me.After two nights in Bien Phong, we were taken by jeep to a jail compound in Ban Me Thuot for more interrogation. Because it was now the Tet holiday, the other prisoners had been released or transferred so we were the only captives there. For hours at a time, my mother was questioned about my father and the other men in the group, but she always answered, “I don’t know.” Here we were given rice, fish sauce, and green mustard, food I had never tasted before. I also got my first pair of shoes! When the week was up, the head of the jail took us to Pleiku by jeep for even more interrogation. Surprisingly we were housed at the home of an officer named Thiep for almost two weeks before being taken to the Cuhe District. On the way we stopped at a restaurant, and I ate noodles for the first time in my life. The Cuhe District jail was miserable. The first night we were locked in a square metal container with no windows. The next day we were put in a regular jail cell. Though there were three doors to the cell, I remember that there was no light and no ventilation except for a small vent 3 inches by 3 inches. The smells were intensely horrible as there was no toilet facility except for a designated corner of the cell. Early the next morning we were taken to my mom’s home village, Plei Betel, to be exhibited as an example of what happens to people who rebel against the Communists. This village had been named by my grandfather, a man who had become a Christian when he helped missionary Charlie Long translate the New Testament into the Jarai language. At Plei Betel we were able to see my mother’s family, including my grandparents, aunts, and uncles. No one from the family had known until then that we had been captured. Though we were guarded, the family was allowed to prepare a chicken for us to eat and to pack an oil lamp, food, clothes, and blankets for us to take back to the jailAfter two more weeks, we were taken to the Plei Mnu village to once again serve as an example. This village so happened to be the home village of one of my mother’s close friends, and amazingly we were allowed to spend the night in her home! Early the next morning, though, we were awakened and taken to another village, Plei Io Lang. Here our guards rang the village bell to summon all the villagers. “These are criminals!” shouted our guards to warn the villagers that this could be their fate, too, if they rebelled or resisted the Communist authorities. I had to stand beside my mother through this ordeal and was not allowed to play with any of the village children. By this time, my mother was close to her due date so she was allowed to go to her home village, but every day until the baby was born she was taken into the city in a motorcycle sidecar for questioning. Once again, all she would ever answer to the questions she was asked was, “I don’t know.” After my baby sister was born, my mother sneaked out of the village several times at night to see my father and show him the baby. In November of 1992, my father was able to join the group of 400 Montagnards that came to the United States for asylum. He was in the group that settled in Charlotte, where he found work. As soon as he could, he sent money to my mother back in Vietnam. With these funds, she bought a little plot of land and lumber for a small house, which she built herself. The first night in our new home we slept on the dirt floor, and the next day my mother cut wood to make a bed for us. In 1995, my father was able to apply for sponsorship for us so that we could come to the United States, but mysteriously the paperwork kept disappearing once it arrived in Vietnam. After sending the papers many times and my mother never receiving it, my father sent the documents to one of my mother’s friends at a secret address in Ho Chi Minh City. This time, my mother received the papers and in 1997, the papers were approved. There was still more to the process, though, as we had to apply for passports in 1998, and go for an immigrations interview in Saigon in 1999. Finally on September 20, 1999, we had our interview and were cleared for travel. On December 2, 1999, we arrived in Charlotte, North Carolina.My first impression of the United States was freedom! After all we had been through, now we were free! My first impression of Charlotte was “What a lot of tall buildings!” I had never seen so many tall buildings before. Though I knew only two English words, “Yes” and “No,” I enrolled in the ninth grade at Independence High School in Charlotte. I was put in an ESL class with several other students who were newcomers and knew only a little English, too, so we all helped each other. Though I was the only person from Vietnam in my ESL class, there were a couple of Vietnamese girls in the upper grades who helped me adjust to life in the U.S. When I graduated from high school, I enrolled in the general studies program at Central Piedmont Community College. At that time I was also working at Food Lion and then later on at CVS. My family and I attended the Dega Church in Matthews, NC. One day the pastor from the Montagnard Alliance Church in Charlotte asked me to help out with their youth choir, which practiced every Saturday night. One Saturday evening a young man named Neil Nay came to the practice. He was a Montagnard who had come to the U.S. with his family in 1994. They had settled in Raleigh, but now he was attending UNC-Charlotte to study electrical engineering. While living in Charlotte, he had helped the pastor start the Alliance church. He saw me at choir practice and thought I was “kind of cute” (his words) and asked a friend who I was. After practice he asked his friend to call me to find out if I would be interested in going on a date with him.When the friend called me later on that night, Neil got on the phone and we started talking. He asked me if I would like to “go get some lunch sometime.” I agreed to meet him at the CVS where I was working on Monday. We went to the Carolina Place Mall and after we walked around the mall for a while, he took me out to eat at Red Lobster. I did not realize it, but our date was going to cause him to be late for his second shift job at Selectron. He called his boss and explained that he was going to be 45 minutes late because he had taken a “friend” out for lunch. The boss must have known this was more than just a casual lunch, because he was very understanding about Neil’s tardiness. Neil graduated from UNC-Charlotte in December 2005, and invited me to his graduation. It was not long after that that my mother wanted to know who was it that kept calling me all the time. Neil was working second shift, but would call me during his breaks and then after he got off work at midnight. Our cell phone bills were enormous! In February 2007 Neil got a job at Tyco Electronics, now called TE Connectivity, and moved to Greensboro. On October 6, 2007, we became engaged. In our culture, an engagement is a major event. My family traveled from Charlotte to Neil’s parents’ home in Raleigh. There in front of our families, Neil’s pastor, and the elders and deacons of his church, we exchanged rings. Back home in Vietnam engaged couples exchange bracelets, but Neil had gotten me a diamond ring and I had gotten him a gold band. He would wear the band on his right hand until our marriage ceremony. Our wedding day was August 30, 2008. We were married at North Ridge Alliance Church in Raleigh, with Sammy MacGarvey performing the ceremony. Over 400 of our family and friends were there to share our special day.